Last year the Conservative Party introduced a fee for media to attend and report on its annual Autumn conference.
The reason given was it was to
“discourage over-accreditation”, adding “At one recent conference several thousand people who applied for free media accreditation failed to collect their passes, generating large amounts of paper and plastic waste. In previous years, police security checks for non-attendees have cost the party tens of thousands of pounds.”
Now of course if this was true, all those attending would have the fee refunded, leaving the non-attenders to pay for the waste. There are no refunds.
In addition to this fee, we also actually have to pay if we want a desk space and power.
Last year this left me in the position of paying to attend and then spending the time I was not shooting sitting on the floor whilst editing and filing my images.
Over the years attending the event has been very worthwhile for me, managing to get a good show in the papers and a few front pages.
Now however, the market has got tighter and tighter. The wire agencies have a larger contingent of photographers and better bulk deals for the newspapers, meaning freelancers with higher fees, have to have something significant for a picture editor to be able to choose thier image over one included in a bulk subscription deal.
If you add to this market the insult that most of the larger wires will get a reduced fee to attend conference, these fees tend to squeeze and choke the one-person freelance news-gatherers and photographers.
To put this into context, the other political parties do not charge and provide a workspace for media…
As ever the Conservatives are squeezing the small businesses with absolutely no understanding of how the decisions affect them.
You can read a bit more here..
Julie Edwards-X 